Nocturnal Emissions (25 page)

I was grateful for whoever had left this thoughtful gift; it reassured me that what is broken or lacking or scarred can be patched up later on. Maybe not in a way that is, strictly speaking, ideal, of course, but in such a way, I think, that we can find, oh, at least some modicum of balance, if that is the right word, or order; a sense of perseverance in spite of our handicaps and encumbrances!

#5: Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski

Let me begin again, now that I am no longer encumbered.

When you’re lonely, as most of us are, you tend to watch too much TV—and maybe for a sense of soothing nostalgia for a time when I was also lonely (but, at least, young enough to believe I could resolve that in the future), I had taken lately to watching a show I used to enjoy in the 70s, called
Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski.
The character was a detective who was also a psychiatrist, not only for his fellow officers but dispensing his therapy and advice to anyone he might come into contact with on the tough city streets—and he was raised on those streets, so he knew what he was talking about. Jabronski was this slight little man, always in the same somewhat too small charcoal gray suit and narrow tie, with his hair receding from his dome and a squinty little face. He always carried a black revolver, which was tiny as a toy, but he was a mean shot when it came to picking the bad guys off fire escapes and rooftops.

He was all compassion when counseling troubled officers, though.

The show opened with the theme song,
Let it Burn
, sung by sassy black women accompanied by a snazzy electric guitar, and Jabronski was seen sitting on tenement steps with his arm around the shoulders of a sobbing uniformed patrolman, Jabronski jumping on the hood of a parked car and sliding on his rear off the other side with his little gun thrust out to the left and then right, Jabronski with his arm around the shoulders of a sobbing elderly woman, Jabronski slamming a thug twice his size up against a brick wall with his little face and little gun thrust in the bad guy’s face, and so on. When the opening credits ended, the program switched to a commercial. Commercials made me restless, so I thought I would idle through a few other stations and come back in a couple of minutes. I took up my tarnished brass remote, and thumbed its black rubber keys repeatedly like a gun firing on empty cylinders until finally the channel changed. My TV, all composed of glass like my computer, had been performing erratically since the night I had accidentally, tem-porarily cast the house into darkness. Sometimes the blue electricity coursing through the tubes in back of the screen would brighten and throw a fluttering light show across the wall, and other times the current would dim to such a meager trickle I thought it would extinguish itself. When the channel changed, there was an initial burst of jarring static and the broadcast was grainy and wavered for several seconds until it cleared. I wasn’t even sure what number I had thumbed, and was about to enter a channel number I was familiar with when the program that was playing arrested me. Actually, it was the song that was playing that arrested me.

A man was singing and dancing on the screen, while animated flowers of psychedelic colors floated in the background, along with a few silent dancers who followed the singer’s movements. They were maybe women or maybe slim men or a combination of both, in tight white body suits, white boots with platform heels, their faces white with greasepaint, or were those masks? Did their costumes encase their skulls or were they without hair and ears?

The singer himself wore white greasepaint, but also red dots on his cheeks and red lipstick, his eyes ringed in black kohl. His hair was maybe a wig or maybe not, all curly crimson red and bushing out from beneath a black top hat drooping to one side like a crushed stovepipe, ringed with a lime green satin ribbon. He wore a long, black velvet coat, and under that a black body suit blending into black platform shoes. The man was smiling glassy-eyed into the camera, singing, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” over and over as he did his little soft-shoe dance, twirling around and opening his coat at the lyric, “You make me feel like a girl,” to reveal two swirling designs—more animation?—that spun around and around over his breasts like twin hypnotic vortexes. “Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl,” he sang, dancing backward away from the camera then forward, closer, again. Sashaying lightly, nimbly from side-to-side across the screen, his mime-like dancers following along, and when he again sang,

“Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl,” this time he twirled the index finger of both hands in front of his body suit where those hypnotic designs spun around. And he continued singing, “Oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl.”

I recognized this as the song my fellow tenant’s daughter Hee had been singing that morning when I’d spied on her from my window, twirling around and stirring her fingers in front of her tube top in what I now realized was an imitation of this prancing entertainer. I felt an odd tingle throughout my body at the memory of that lovely child, like a surge of the blue electricity that coursed through my TV.

I watched the performer sing and dance for an unknown amount of time, as if mesmerized by the spiraling whirlpools on his chest or the repetition of his lyrics—“Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swiiiiiirl…Silicone Swirl…Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl”—until, with a start, I realized I had been away from
Detective/Psychiatrist Jabronski
for far too long. Cursing myself and sitting up a little taller in my chair, I returned to the channel I had tuned to earlier and cursed again to see that the program was well underway.

Jabronski sat on a curb beside a fellow plainclothes officer, whose face was cupped in his hands. This cop was moaning, “I don’t think I can take much more of this, Jabronski. I don’t know how you’ve been able to do it as long as you have. Babies born drug addicts, man—
born drug addicts!
Drug-addicted babies needing a goddamn fix!”

The small, balding Jabronski always spoke in a high-pitched, city-tough accent, and snapped out his words with hard-eyed confidence. He slipped an arm around the bigger cop’s shoulders and said, “Jimmy, it’s like this. You gotta

–” and Jabronski paused to look off into space thoughtfully, as if searching for just the right analogy “– you gotta build a fire. “(In his city accent, he said it
fi-ah
.) Nodding with satisfaction at this choice of advice, he looked back to the man and continued with whispered emphasis, “You gotta let it…
burn
.”

The episode continued, with a drug lord named Kane sending his dealers into the unnamed city’s playgrounds and schoolyards, selling drugs to high school kids and kindergarteners alike, until the next commercial break. I quickly picked up my remote to have another look at the entertainer I had stumbled upon, but remembered I had selected the number at random and didn’t know it. Luckily, the remote had a feature that recalled the last channel you had visited. I pressed this key, and found myself back at that channel.

Again, a blast of static before the image appeared, this grainy and watery and the sound distorted until everything cleared. The performer was still singing the same song, the same words, doing the same dance, twirling around and stirring the vortexes over his breasts with his fingers, singing in his sweet light voice, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl” over and over. But this time his troupe of dancing mimes were all suspended from crosses in the background, crucified (without blood), heads hanging low, each with a swirling vortex obscuring their face. All the while, the entertainer in his top hat and red-rimmed grin singing, “Silicone Swirl you make me feel like a girl…oh Silicooone…Silicone Swirl.”

I was careful not to get too mesmerized this time, but still found my program had continued on without me. Jabronski was sitting on the bottom step of a tenement’s front stairs, beside him a skinny black boy with a huge afro.

This boy looked frustrated, his face scrunched up, and he wagged his head as he said, “I dunno, Jabronski. How can I make her like me? She doesn’t even see me, man. It’s like I don’t exist!”

Jabronski chuckled, and reached out to pat the boy’s head, but stayed his hand at the last second, uncertain about the afro. Instead, he hugged the kid against him a little and said, “Billy, Billy. You gotta build a fi-ah.” Another squeeze against him, and another chuckle as he shook his head. “You gotta let it burn.”

Just then Jabronski’s girlfriend, a shapely blond with layers and layers of blow-dried hair, almost a head taller than himself, a hooker with a heart of gold, came clicking along on her stiletto heels. Jabronski squinted up at her with a little smirk as she crooked a finger at him.

“Daaamn,” said Billy, looking up at her.

Another commercial break, and with it another look at that other station, as if answering a compulsion, now that I had its number memorized. Yet this time, the static wouldn’t clear. No picture would resolve itself, but through the hiss and crackle—if I bent my head close to the screen—as if from a great distance I heard the faintest music and the tiniest voice cheerfully singing, “Oh Silicooone… Silicone Swirl…”

Back to Jimmy, the detective Jabronski had counseled earlier, on the edge of a playground while little Billy with his great globe of an afro whispered about some dealers that had been coming around. Just then a car pulled up opposite them, with machine gun barrels poking out of its windows. The guns opened up, and despite Jimmy’s efforts to shield Billy with his body, both of them went down in the gutter. Just as the big boat of a car went screeching off, Jabronski’s beat-up but revved-up car came shrieking around the corner. He spotted the two bodies, jammed on his brakes, jumped out and raced to his fallen friends. As a consequence of being riddled with countless bullets, both Jimmy and Billy had a trickle of blood running down from one corner of their mouths. Kneeling down, Jabronski cradled the dead boy across his knees, turned his face up to the gray city sky and screamed in his high-pitched voice,
“Noooo!”

Just then, a pay phone a little down the street started ringing. Jabronski gently lay Billy back down again, went to the phone and snatched the receiver.

The camera cut to the headquarters of drug lord Kane, who said menacingly into his own phone’s mouthpiece, “You pushed me too far, Jabronski. Now it’s your move. How do you want to call it?”

Jabronski was trembling with pent-up rage, barely able to contain it. Tears streamed down his face, and through gritted teeth, his city-tough voice even more high-pitched with the strain of his emotions, he cried, “You gotta build a fi-ah! You hear me, Kane?” The camera moved in closer on his tormented, intense face. “You gotta let it
buuuuuuuuuurn!
”

As the story progressed, Jabronski launched a one-man raid on Kane’s main drug-producing plant. Suddenly Kane pulled up in his big boat of a car, and Jabronski vaulted onto the hood of his own beat-up but revved-up vehicle, slid to the opposite side on his rear, and when he landed fired bullets to the left and the right, dropping the two henchmen Kane had brought with him.

Jabronski chased Kane into the plant, where the drug lord tried to elude the cop by climbing up on some catwalks above his drug-producing operation.

When he whirled to take a few shots back at Jabronski, he lost his balance and fell screaming into a huge bubbling vat of some illegal and potent concoction.

Perhaps he died in a mixed state of terror and bliss, one hand groping at the air before it sank down out of view.

A commercial. Just static on that channel now. Why had I never seen this station before? Had the anomalous hotdog-cooking incident caused my TV to be able to pick it up, where it hadn’t before? And would I ever be able to receive it again? For now, no matter how high I cranked the volume, no matter how close I drew to the screen, I couldn’t make out any music or singing.

In the concluding scene to this episode of
Detective/PsychiatristJabronski
, just before the closing credits and a reprise of the song
Let it Burn
, we cut to Jabronski in bed with his statuesque hooker girlfriend, both with the blanket pulled up primly to their armpits. Jabronski was smoking a cigarette, and his girlfriend tickled his ear with one finger, purring, “How do you do it, Jabronski? Go undercover all day…and undercover all night with me, too?”

“You gotta build a fi-ah, baby,” he told her, his cigarette bobbing in his mouth. “You gotta let it burn.”

#6: The Ephemeral Eye

Being an employee at Nepenthe Pharmaceuticals, I could have had the drug Insanolin prescribed free by my doctor, had I needed it—but fortunately, I had never seen the Ephemeral Eye myself. This town I lived in—Gosston—was mid-sized, and the Ephemeral Eye tended to visit larger cities, though it was not wise to assume one was safe anywhere. There had been numerous cases where the huge phantom Eye had been spotted floating above the tops of forest trees by unlucky campers, or travelers on lonely back roads, or out the windows of remote farm houses. Typically, however, the glowing green Eye came drifting over the cities of this world, drifting low over the tops of tenement blocks or navigating between the canyon walls of office towers, then coming to a stop to hover in a stationary position for a few minutes or as long as an hour, often nosed up so close to one window that a person might easily feel they had been singled out in the whole of that city for the Eye’s present appearance. In such a case, when the Eye seemed that particular, its visit that intimate—at least to the occupant living behind that window—the individual usually required a full 150mg (2X daily) dose of Insanolin after the incident.